Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
Escape from the Goldilocks Planet
Wednesday, October 6th, 2010
She lost her name on Stiltskin 9, another casualty when the reputation economy crashed. She made it offworld with a few credit cubes and a broken-down matter fabricator.
From the first, though, her new planet turned out to be just wrong. The fabricator’s nanotech assembly was stuck, would only convert straw to gold. And she couldn’t find any straw, just calderas of steaming, congealed, or lukewarm porridge. The last of her cubes bought her way into a domed city, but it was nearly hibernation season, and the super-intelligent bears shunned her, in spite of her fur coat and matching gloves.
The bears favored semi-communal open-plan architecture, so wandering the city felt to her like wandering a single immense home. Soon enough, she was completely alone, the bears having all retreated to the privacy of their winter dens. She made herself at home, helping herself to the leftovers in the bears’ kitchens, snoozing warily in their summer beds, and whiling away hours in their virtual reality entertainment chairs–at least, whenever she could find one with a neural helmet neither too large nor too small.
One day, she met an insomniac. His was the only brightly-lit living area. Where she’d heard white noise forest-sound lullabies coming from the dens of other bears, he had a frantic electro-fiddle hoedown screeching from his speakers. He was sitting at a bark-covered kitchen table with a mug of coffee as big as her head.
“I get nightmares,” he grumbled.
She hadn’t asked.
“Humans in my house while I sleep. Touching my stuff.”
She folded her hands in her lap.
“Never seen a human.” He shuddered. “I hear they’re mostly hairless.”
She’d noticed the VR entertainments were redacted so that all other sentient species appeared as bears.
She tugged her fur-lined hood forward. “I can’t sleep either. Just moved from the other hemisphere. Biological clock still off.” The quick-spun tale surprised her. “I could keep a lookout for you. Let you rest.”
There was gratitude in the bear’s bloodshot eyes. “I couldn’t pay you, except in trade.” He motioned toward stacks of crates. “I’m in import. High-end porridge bowls.”
She shrugged, “Sure.” It was safer than serial housebreaking.
“Didn’t catch your name,” said the bear.
She saw an open crate, a bit of packing material spilled out. Straw.
“Call me Goldy,” she said. The fabricator was a restless weight in her pocket. “I’m in export.”
The Tree of What Could Be
Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010
He read the directions. Five times. The machine had to run, a persistent low whine, for ten days to calibrate itself to his reality, to his “multiversal node-ality.”
After ten days, the button on the front glowed green like page 12 said it would. He pushed it, as described, gently, firmly. The whine became a hum.
In the early hours of day 72, it was lack of hum as much as the machine’s shrill chime that woke him. He dragged a kitchen chair over, sat there in his bathrobe and slippers, the machine’s chilly visor on his eyes, its navigation gloves too tight on his hands.
The interface was anything but intuitive; after an hour, he asked the house for coffee, stronger and more of it than usual. That helped.
The display branched and rebranched, a vast tree, a neuron’s dendrites, a river delta, dividing ever finer. He figured out the twist of hands that allowed him to sync with a particular branch. To drop into the consciousness of his parallel self in that alternate reality.
In the first, he noticed his bathrobe plaid was redder. In the second, his mug brimmed with herbal tea. He went further, twisted gloves, and spent ten minutes searching before he realized that the movies on the arthouse calendar on the fridge were in a different order. But the titles, stars, synopses, were the same, and the same scattering of magnets held it in place.
He’d hoped for something more dramatic–a world ruled by Nazis, or communists, or dinosaurs. A home built of mudbrick, glass, or pure light. A body that was taller, in better shape or half robot. But no matter how far out across the tree of alternatives, all he saw was too-close versions of his too-familiar kitchen.
He began to twiddle the machine in ways the manual discouraged, in ways it warned against, and finally in ways dared not mention. He was sure his other selves were doing the same, all looking for somewhere other.
He twisted in to see, just as another reality turned to nothing but light. An explosion–he saw it in one universe after another, and was too busy watching to do fiddle any further with his own machine.
When his was the only branch left, the machine made a sound like a lightbulb burning out.
He stood and rubbed his eyes, feeling very, very alone.